A more efficient use of China’s coal resources is key to rapidly promoting the growth of the country’s industrializing economy. As such, it is essential that an effective approach for measuring and evaluating the current efficiency of coal resources is developed. This paper measures the efficiency of coal resources in 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2015 using an improved DEA model of Bootstrap, and it uses Tobit regression to analyze the influencing factors on the efficiency of coal resources. The results illustrate that: 1) The proposed approach could significantly improve upon the accuracy of the measurement of the traditional DEA model. 2) The efficiency of coal resources shows an uptrend of fluctuation for the research period. With respect to the influential factors, total coal consumption has the least influence on the efficiency of coal resources. In contrast, local financial science and technology expenditures have greatest influence on the efficiency of coal resources. Among all the influential factors, local financial science and technology expenditures have the greatest negative impact on energy efficiency of coal resources and it is very critical that the government increases investment in scientific and technological investment in the mining industry. •This paper uses Bootstrap-DEA to calculate the ECR of 30 provinces in China.•The finding that FST has negative impact on ECR is the most serious, particularly for 14 provinces in China.•GDP, IPC and SEC have negative impacts on ECR in 8 provinces.•COC has negative impact on ECR in 6 provinces.•TER and RPY have negative impacts on ECR including in 11 provinces and 9 provinces respectively.